2013-05-21T07:32:44-04:00 Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=tom-payne Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Tom Payne Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.907849 2011-07-25T15:58:39-04:00 2011-09-24T05:12:01-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
When the BBC announced Amy Winehouse's death, the sentence it took was followed by another, delivered in their house style. "She was 27." And in the rolling headlines on BBC news, her age had a line of its own. By now there's no need to start listing the musicians who died at 27. In many ways, it's irrelevant. Some go earlier, some later. Except -- today there was something grimly inevitable about the news. It's just that the inevitability only had a little to do with the number.

In 2008, the British media, with that delicacy the world has suddenly come to appreciate, made a headline out of something Amy's father Mitch had said: that a single cigarette could kill her. He was sharing with us all the news that she had been diagnosed with emphysema, but it was all too easy to read it as another intimation of mortality, as if there hadn't been enough in her music. And then, those glimpses of mortality had become so public: the late appearances; the way in which she was vocally present in the video for "Valerie" but absent physically; the stumbling and the winnowing.

There's a debate worth having about whether some of those glimpses should have been public at all -- how did her night of drug-taking end up, via British magazines, on TMZ? As a result, something primal happened between her and her audience. She seemed to have a knowledge of the end that awaits us all, by seeming so much closer to it than many of us.

A hundred years ago, in his vast examination of sacrifice myths, The Golden Bough, James Frazer recorded that the Albanians of the Caucasus kept their slaves in a temple of the Moon. These slaves were already inspired, prophetic people, but when one was even more inspired and left the temple for the woods, he was captured and maintained in luxury for a year. At the end of the year, he was sacrificed.

These people were sacrificed because there was something divine about them. Frazer puts them in the catalogue he calls, "Killing the God." There was a time, he argues, when to human beings, even gods were mortal. There's something that asserts our own strength as humans when we see that something divine is perishable.

This doesn't explain at all why artists such as Amy Winehouse die so young. It doesn't have to. Scientists have already looked into it. A study by Mark Bellis and others, conducted at Liverpool John Moores University, looked at North American and European musicians who had performed in any album on a list of "All-Time Top 1000 albums," and found that they were 1.7 times more likely to die at an early age than the rest of us. The survey suggested that this is caused by "high levels of stress in environments where alcohol and drugs are widely available."

Yes, Amy Winehouse became powerfully addicted to those things, and her gift did bring her into that environment. Her obituarists are already commenting on how fresh-faced she looked as new talent, and how unemaciated she was. But there's the guilty feeling that these addictions had something to do with her gift; or at least, our appreciation of it. As Clive James wrote of her, "When that young woman sings, it's the revelation of a divine gift -- but when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can't help thinking of divine wrath." He added, "Can't the force that made her so brilliant give her strength?"

This already suggests the presence of the divine. But that gift is a burden that goes way beyond the clinical anticipation of "high stress levels." If anything, Winehouse's art directed that conflict directly, appearing for a moment to find something life-affirming in the refusal to go to rehab. In reality, she went to rehab. But, like Billie Holiday before her, she articulated a pain that goes far enough beyond ordinary experience to offer a kind of consolation to anyone who shares any measure of it. Her line, "Tears dry on their own," was so neat that it seemed found rather than planned; as though she had been given a unique understanding of tears.

So it will be that her very death will appear part of her art, and that very number 27 will become the key note of a narrative that is ultimately not so much inevitable as predictable, even derivative. This, too, will be part of the tragedy. As Paul Gambaccini noted tonight, "We've lost 20 years of great records, and Mitch Winehouse has lost a daughter." There are many reflections that it's the fame she enjoyed and endured that destroyed her.

This, too, fits in with a sort of predetermined pattern; but the shock and sadness of Winehouse's death must remind us that her tears really were unique, and the way in which she bore that fame was her own story. It remains her own story, even when you compare her to Byron. In that poem, written on his last birthday, he wrote:

The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze -
A funeral pile.

That image of a volcanic isle does convey the loneliness of the artist, especially when we all feel we "get" what he or she is going through, and often simply can't. But it also evokes the splendid un-predictability, the stark uniqueness, of a real gift. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.894020 2011-07-13T20:45:21-04:00 2011-09-12T05:12:01-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
It took something genuinely horrible to elicit this reaction from all of us, and not only those who bought the News of the World every week. It took the revelation that an investigator listened to the 'phone messages of the murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, and then deleted them. On top of this came the news that families of men who died for their country suffered the same indignity.

No earlier allegations about 'phone hacking outdo this depth of grubbing around for an anguished quotation. And yet we need to ask the question -- why weren't we disgusted and nauseated before? A timeline of the scandal is revealing. It began in 2005, with a story about Prince William's knee. The News of the World's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, went to prison as a result. He was clearly a bad man, but the law courts dealt with it. End of story, except, poor Prince William, having his 'phone hacked. We're sorry about the knee, too. Get well soon, your Royal Highness.

Then came the celebrities: Sienna Miller was distressed, but amply compensated. The deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, surely had his 'phone hacked. But he was up to no good in any case, and as for Sienna Miller -- she's appeared in racy films.

Now, about Sienna Miller: I've heard it seriously argued that it's all right to invade her privacy. Some wag on one of those "21st-Century Worst Celebrity Moments" pageants actually articulated the idea that, because she'd been topless in a film, she shouldn't mind about pap photos of her bust on the beach. The logical consequences of this don't bear thinking about. But the fact that someone thought he could get away with this line on national television suggests that he anticipated some sympathy from his audience. (I forget the fellow's name.)

Recently, though, the BBC gave Hugh Grant a platform for his views on the subject -- this time, his voice was unmediated by print and pictures. He was talking to the PM programme's Privacy Commission, and stressed that his concern was not merely for the rich -- it was for ordinary people.

Now, this distinction between the rich and famous on the one hand, and the ordinary on the other, needs careful examination, especially in an age when, we're told, more and more people are becoming famous for less and less. If it's true that more of us are famous, then, to a tabloid journalist, more of us are worth listening to, whether we want to be heard or not. Journalists want to catch us as they want to catch celebrities: when we're off-guard, or vulnerable -- as if that makes us more human, and our experiences closer to those of other mortals. Even so, one implication is that some people want fame and achieve it, and others achieve it without wanting it at all. In the latter category belong the victims of crime. To invade their privacy strikes us as all the more deplorable since they didn't seek to share their lives with the rest of us, nor to profit from who they happen, for better or for worse, to be.

Isn't everyone entitled to this degree of dignity? It sounds like a trivial question but -- can't Sienna Miller sunbathe in peace, regardless of anything she may have done for Vogue? Can't the artists who submit themselves for interview on the BBC's Front Row programme do so without having to answer questions about their sexuality? Does Sir Max Mosley's night life have much bearing on his ability to do the day job at the Formula 1 office?

There are plenty of stories worth telling, and scandals to unearth; and we need journalists to cover them. But how much better is the journalist who can do it using, say, the Freedom of Information act, that began the exposure of parliamentarians who fiddled their expenses; or who can cultivate whistleblowers? To gain a story by 'phone-hacking, and the subsequent blagging and blackmail, or by intrusion -- isn't that a little easy, or worse, a little cheap?

It took Patrick Swayze a while to tell his mother that he was dying. As it turned out, he didn't have the chance to break it to her. A reporter had already rapped on her door and asked for her reaction to the news. In Swayze's memoirs, he responds to this with a little sarcasm, then moves on. Now, for someone as illustrious as Prince William to hurt his knee -- this, somehow, is news. For a celebrity to have a terminal illness -- yes, it's news. For one of us to lose a loved one, through murder or through war -- it's traumatic, and the more traumatic it is, the more it's news. It looks for a moment like a spectrum, or a formula: the less famous you are, the more terrible your life has to be for it to become interesting to the rest of us. But this obscures a constant: some aspects of this news will always be intimate and incommunicable. It remains for the rest of us to show the compassion to say, How would I feel under those circumstances? And to go about the rest of our lives.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.827184 2011-02-23T13:14:32-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
I wonder if it's at all possible that you've been reading my stuff?

When I last wrote about you, it was to put your meat outfit into a cultural context. In case you didn't see it, I was paying homage to your ability to express so powerfully (pungently?) the way in which fame is a kind of sacrifice; after all, the Aztecs (we're told) would use the skins of their victims to clad other devotees of, say, the goddess of maize.

I did mean it seriously, but as theses go, it was adventurous.

But now you're doing (or allowing it to be believed that you're doing) this sensational thing with the blood in your perfume. It makes me think, cripes, I was right.

Did you read Patrick Suskind's book Perfume, too? In case some didn't, or missed the film, it ends with a master parfumier being ripped apart by a crowd in a Bacchant frenzy.

Now, I use that image in my own book about Fame, in which I ponder the whole celebrity perfume industry. I'm intrigued by the idea of celebrity smells, and by the delightful notion that stars are involved in their production. (How much time would Donald Trump have had to work on Donald Trump: The Fragrance, do you suppose?)

At one point I muse about the impact a fragrance has when it diffuses into the world; some essence of the celebrity permeates the air we all breathe. What happens then is that some aspect, or emination, of that celebrity makes an individual dividual. You really can divide some part of you among your celebrants. Somewhere out there, there must still be a few sniffs-worth of Mystique de Michael Jackson.

In a way, it's a metaphor to explain how we consume the famous.

In another way, though, it isn't, because, hey, Gaga, you took it literally! That really could be your precious blood. (How precious, the market can determine.) Out it pumps, from you to bottle, and from vaporiser to ether.

So what are you going to do next? I've a feeling I ought to know already, but can't say. Something simultaneously gross and intimate, we can be sure.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.825743 2011-02-22T18:04:36-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
You must be hugely excited about getting married, and I know there'll be a lot on your mind, so I won't keep you long.

I envy you the whole business of the vows, choosing the hymns, declaring your love. (You've also managed to shave off some costs on the venue hire, I gather.)

But I certainly don't envy you the public interest in your guest list. When I got married, I was a schoolteacher, and boys kept asking, "Can I come?" It turned out they were serious, and I had to say no quite unambiguously.

We all want to know whom you're inviting because we all want to come. And rumors are going crazy right now. Can it really be that Kanye West can come, and Joss Stone, but not your auntie, the Duchess of York?

Yes, I know it's awkward -- all that schnorring by selling off access to her equally influential ex-husband; the dietary advice; the children's books about helicopters. You never know what she'll come out with.

But then, you've taken a pretty crazy punt on asking your brother to be best man. Don't you just know that, however extensively the Lord Chamberlain vets your speech, he'll slip in some anecdote or innuendo that won't go down so well with, say, the Governor of Canada? Unless there's some dark family feud that you've managed to keep secret (and what could that be?) I think I know why you haven't invited Fergie.

(Oh not that Fergie. If Kanye West is coming, then surely Fergie is.)

You didn't invite her because you plain forgot. Trust me, it happens. I have this second cousin -- and I know that sounds remote -- but I have a second cousin who's wise and funny and used to look after me when I was a baby. And it was after the whole honeymoon that I realized -- I didn't ask Auntie Mary! Such an apology letter I wrote. "Chump" doesn't begin to cover how I felt.

Luckily for you, the British media is on hand to check these things. You just have to say that the letter got lost in the post. (Yes, I know it's your mother's post, but if she's got any sense she's having the invites Fed-Exed or something.) She was always going to come, you tell her.

She's been putting on a brave face so far. She says she was going to be out of the country anyhow. But you need to keep her in the country, not only to limit the damage she can do to British businesses during her excursions, but also to spare the poor girl's feelings. How's she going to feel when she sees you've asked David and Victoria Beckham? It's no use telling her that you got to know David when you were doing England's Soccer World Cup Bid, and that he's a really great guy. She knows the truth -- that he's really a work friend.

It's none of my business, of course, but don't do something you'll regret. The Trojan War started with a bungled wedding list, and, scarier still, so did Sleeping Beauty.

With best wishes for your nuptials, your obedient servant,

Tom]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.815126 2011-01-27T20:35:43-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/ The Catcher in the Rye, but it turns out that he was a media popsy who was desperate to make contact with people and write books apart from The Catcher in the Rye.

The news from East Anglia is that a collection of letters JD Salinger wrote to a British friend, Donald Hartog, have now been given to archivists at the University of East Anglia. Journalists in Britain are agog at the idea that the great writer was giving off vital signs as late as 1989.

Far from secluding himself and eating lentils between bouts of yoga, it turns out that he was passionately engaged with the world. The proof is -- he wrote letters. To a friend. As far away as Britain.

More alarmingly, there are hints from the letters that he was working on something. For copyright reasons, we're not sure he was working on yet. A titanium shield for his barn, probably, but still, it's a start.
To be fair to the Salinger-seeking desperadoes, it seems that he travelled, too. He made it further than Niagara Falls; he actually came to Britain.

He chose his time wisely. It was a time when Margaret Thatcher was going ever crazier, and Europe was thinking about the Berlin Wall collapsing rather than novellas about Zen Buddhists. And he was careful to avoid Planet Hollywood on Piccadilly, Madame Tussauds and Buckingham Palace. It's unlikely that he even saw Cats.

One touching detail has slipped from the correspondence, though. He rather admired the tennis player Tim Henman. Remember Tim Henman? He was a tennis player from Britain before Andy Murray eclipsed him. We were all excited about him in the UK for a while, but he didn't catch on globally.

Salinger picked his celebrity with reliable brilliance: famous for a bit, then you never hear of him again. For all we know, Tim Henman is working on something as we speak.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.808278 2011-01-12T18:07:49-05:00 2011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
I know he's not really called Piers Warning, but I presume you know whom I'm talking about. In the London Times last weekend he whooped about being a one-name celebrity, "like Madonna".

You do know about Piers Morgan, right? I ask because I'm British, and know almost all about him. But when I was revising my book about fame for publication in the US, I laughed a contented laugh when I was advised to add a line about who he was.

I laughed because his published diaries have always been so clear that he's cracked the States -- he won Celebrity Apprentice, after all, and judges talent shows. But now who's laughing, with that affable British chuckle? Piers Morgan is. Piers is.

So, in case you still need to know a little about him as he takes over from Larry King on CNN, would a few impressions help?

He's quite a chap, really. He's frequently made an arse of himself -- he still tends to defend himself about an admittedly tricky judgement call he made at the helm of a national newspaper, and he constantly has to answer questions about a snafu involving shares about which he might have known a little too much before he bought them. There's been a diverting spat with Naomi Campbell, too. But he shrugs off this stuff with aplomb.

He manages it with a beguiling mix of chutzpah and self-mockery. Take those diaries, for example. He drops enough names to pockmark the pavement, but faithfully reports all the putdowns his famous chums put his way.

There's a similar trick to his interviews. Come on, tell Uncle Piers. He's a man of the world. To know all is to forgive all. As a result, his guests tend to cry, including his friend, the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

(There, he's at it again. He's mates with the Prime Minister! Yes, but with the socially awkward Prime MInister. Still, he makes Brown cry.) He made the UK's sweetheart Cheryl Cole cry, too -- tell me how you nearly died of malaria; tell me how much your ex-husband really hurt you -- until Cheryl turned away, shielded her eyes and observed that this is entertainment for everyone else, but life for her.

The techique is that of a python. If you go on his show, he'll wrap himself around you, and keep pumping, till almost all information, or life, is out you. And just before the last constriction, he'll make you feel he's sorry to be doing it, but that he just has to have one last pump.

It's possible that in the US he won't have to pump so hard. We Brits are a little less willing to share, and won't say much without a squeeze. (There are exceptions, such as Richard Branson and Susan Boyle.) But he'll get it out of you, and probably do some good. He asked Cheryl Cole, "Is this therapy for you?" to which she replied, "I'll let you know in a couple of hours' time."

Perhaps this explains why some of his first guests are people who are apt to let us into their worlds: Oprah, Howard Stern, Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian? What's left to tell? I'm sure the next batch of guests will be lustrous, but look out, in case he's joined by Snooki. His new audience mightn't catch the thrill of the hunt, that gasp as he feels for the pulse in a stone; but his guests will appreciate him. They'll need a glass of water during the interview, but by the end, they'll think that Piers has served them tea and biscuits.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.735314 2010-09-22T15:18:50-04:00 2011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00

Tom Payne http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-payne/
All this noise is saying that we don't know how to respond to a woman who arrives at a party dressed as an abbatoir. The signs are that she doesn't know either. There now seems to be a formula for answering this question. Let n equal a statement of something Gaga believes in, therefore "I am not a piece of meat." For example, Gaga thinks that gays in the military shouldn't have to hide their sexuality, ergo "If we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as many rights as the meat on our bones." Are you following this so far?

Me neither. But, like everyone else, I've been worrying about it. Luckily for you, I've been worrying about it for the past five years, so that now I can tell you, straight out, that, like Arthur Rimbaud, "I hold the key to this savage parade."

Let's start with the fairly safe assumption that Lady Gaga is a consummate artist, and as an artist she does more than non-artists do to tap into her subconscious. It's what surrealists do, and I don't think Gaga would mind being called surreal. And what are these subconscious impulses telling her to tell us? Some kind of an answer can be found in myth, ritual and sacrifice.

Sir James Frazer's book, The Golden Bough, is full of all three. It appeared a century ago and surveys worlds and ages of ritual to bring us to a few big conclusions. The most read section looks back to the Aztecs. Their rituals emphasized the continuity and newness of life, which is ironic, since they involved killing people. In one, a woman represents the mother of the gods. She is sacrificed, and skinned; then a man dances around in her skin. Frazer speculates that this could "represent the resurrection of the slain goddess in the person of the priest who wore her costume and mask and dangled the severed head of her slaughtered representative".

Now, Lady Gaga might not plan on embodying the Aztec mother of the gods. But let's start by looking at this on the level of metaphor. She is the most exposed celebrity there is at the moment. She's reached this position by the occasional first-rate song, and by some punishingly uncomfortable outfits, often in rubber -- a second skin. And, as a famous person, she knows that this exposure will be fleeting. Her audience - us -- will require new celebrities to sustain us; we need constantly to replace the gods and goddesses to worship.

I see our veneration of celebrities, and the harsh way in which we dismiss them, as nothing new, and in my book, Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Out Cult of Celebrity, I look at past cultures to ask if the way in which we have treated celebrities throughout time has changed that much, and if so, what does that tell us about ourselves? I think that we have always needed idols, and that they bond us; but then, tearing them apart has bonded us even more.

For whatever reason, Gaga is in touch with this, and she's found a ghoulish way of representing it. But it's no more ghoulish than anything earlier civilizations came up with. We needn't even dwell on the practice of human sacrifice: the ancient Greeks were keen enough to allude to it in their plays and their ceremonies, even when they were killing cattle.

To a Greek worshiper, it was important that the animal being slaughtered looked like it was assenting to the chop. The victim would be wreathed, and wearing gold: a priest would scatter water on it, so that its head wiggled in a yes sort of way. And then, at the moment of death, the women present would shriek. The priest would then divide up the meat in equal portions - not in neat cuts, like Gaga's. There would be no distinction between, say, topside and rump. There would be plenty of blood.

Sacrifice was the ancient Greek excuse to eat meat. But, like in the Abraham and Isaac story, the victim can be seen as a substitute for a human one. When the Trojan War was about to start, the gods would only let the Greek ships sail if King Agamemnon slew his daughter, Iphigenia. In a play on this subject, she ends up recognizing that she will win glory from this, and so will the Greek army. So she agrees.

In this respect, Lady Gaga cuts straight to the chase. She sacrifices a lot to her audience -- her energy, her comfort and her privacy -- to become this living work of art. And her latest metamorphosis involves looking like she's sloughed off her skin. The metaphor's just as strong in a Robbie Williams video that some broadcasters have banned -- he performs a striptease for eager women, then removes his skin, muscles, tissue and so on. As his meat flies into the crowd of women, they rub it over themselves, like young fox hunters who are initiated into the hunt when they are "blooded" by the dead fox, or else like the women who follow Dionysus, god of wine: they rip their victims apart, and are so high they can't tell man from beast.

It's like Britney Spears sang in an earlier song: They all want a piece of me. Look at me, Gaga seems to be saying: I've come dressed as a barbecue. I'm more raw than cooked but hey, help yourselves. You know you want to. You always have.

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